Nicole Pank: geek, nerd, front end developer, punk rock girl.

Things have been looking up. I’ve become terrible at blogging, but I’m still powering through MakerSquare. Really, I’ve become terrible at blogging in part because I’m still powering through MakerSquare. Understand that when I say “powering through,” I mean it. When I ask questions of my friends who have been developers for a long time, they often express amazement at the level of understanding I must be at to ask the questions I’m asking, for having been doing this for under two months. (Lesson: don’t let Impostor Syndrome get to you… no matter how little you think you know, you’re probably doing just fine.) So when I say that by the end of the day, I’m often too tired to even look at a computer screen, much less write a blog post, that’s a testament to the sheer amount of data my brain is processing.

Anyway. Blogging. I haz it. Here we go:

In week 4, the day after most of us deployed our first ever Sinatra apps up to Heroku, we started out on Rails. Having a framework to create apps in makes life so much easier! Lightbulbs went on over the heads of many in my class as a bunch of “think like a programmer” type logic clicked beautifully into place.

In week 5, we got deep into Backbone.js, and deeper into Rails. Working on learning two MVC pattern syntaxes at once notwithstanding, just having a solid idea of how model-view-controller patterns work makes a lot of other logic make sense. I won’t say I’ve never put Ruby syntax into my Javascript code at the end of a long day, but at least the logic is correct. And, y’know, I eventually notice and fix it. 😉

Week 6 was rough, I’m not going to lie. I had been feeling pretty good up until that point. I’d been taking good care of myself, getting enough sleep, making sure to have a day each week where I didn’t code, and just doing all the things one should do to avoid burnout during a 10-week learning marathon. My energy was high, and I felt like I had a reasonable understanding of most/all of what I was doing in class. And then… I hit burnout anyway. I hit it hard. There may have been tears involved. And by “may have been,” I mean I was crying over my Underscore.js templates in the front room while the amazing @elyseholladay was leading a class on SCSS in the back room. Luckily (although admittedly also embarrassingly), Nick happened to come out and see me losing it. I’m actually pretty decent at Javascript, but in that condition I was no use to anybody, least of all myself. He pointed out what were essentially a couple of dumb typos on my part (lesson: stop freaking out and check your spelling) and then dragged me outside so I could rant some more before I headed home and he headed back to the DevHouse to get some rest.

Thankfully, the next day was a half-day, because of the Austin Startup Crawl. In theory, Nick and I spent that afternoon at a coffee shop to work together on some Rails stuff that was confusing us both in different ways (lesson: different teachers have different teaching styles that will mesh well with different learning styles; find a friend who learns best from a different teacher than you do and teach each other ALL THE THINGS), but mostly, we shared some badly needed decompression time and just goofed off a whole lot.

Anyway. That night, after my shift as the arbiter of sign-ins and drink tickets at MakerSquare’s front door, Nick and I grabbed our homeboy Justin and headed out for some networking (and drinking, for the first time in weeks). Long story short (she said, at the end of this gargantuan post), after that night of loud drunken bonding, the three of us will be working together over the next few weeks on a really terrific final project.

And no, I’m not going to tell you about that project just yet. Tomorrow is the first half of our second hackathon. The guys and I have a pretty sweet minimum viable product planned out, and no way am I going to spoil the surprise before we even start building it. 😉 Stop by next week for details of what we accomplished. I promise I’ll be good about blogging again and post them.

PS – I did finally manage to get in on a SCSS lesson. CSS with math! Sassy, indeed!